Yeah, I've been there. I've also been to Elkins and Nitro and a passel of other places in WV. Big highway signs at the border: "Ohio: A whole bunch of miles" and others like "Welcome to West Virginia: Gateway to Pennsylvania" and "Parkersburg: We'd post the population only we can't count that high" and "Historical Sight: This here's where the pig in the Hatfield-McCoy Feud was borned".

Friend of mine had a dog once who thought he was a human being,. He would walk around on his hind legs and nod sagaciously. Once they caught him behind the woodshed, experimenting with cigarettes.

Another time, when the family was out, he snuck upstairs and worked out how to put on the Dad's three-piece tweed herringbone suit, stole a pipe from Dad's piperack, and borrowed a fedora and Sis's horn-rimmed glasses that she doesn't wear anymore because they made her look stupid. Dog went out and strolled down town on his hind legs, nodding sagaciously, and listening carefully to whaterver anyone said to him. By the time the family found out where he was, he'd been elected.

Good thing, smart girl. If she sent a card from Germany, the post office simply will not deliver it until the sender has long since returned to the U.S. You might have had to wait quite a while for those Dad Day greetings.

I met some fellas in Ireland that don't seem to like English, Amos. They seemed prudent enough chaps though, since they each had an Individual Retirement Account. At least I think that's what they said -- it was something about IRAs anyway.

The Midwest flood thread seems to have fallen off the list, but here's some pictures from my home town and the surrounding area. (You might have to sit through the show a few times to see them all.) The building with a blue roof is a high-end riverfront restaurant.

Stilly, you'll no doubt be perturbed to hear that I poured about 10 old bottles of beer down the drain here yesterday. They'd been sitting in the downstairs fridge here for years, and no one would drink them. I suspect they were past their due date by now.

Man, Shane would just about lose his mind if he knew I poured beer down the drain, eh? ;-) He already thinks I'm a few cards short of a full deck as it is.

I have decided that the other threads on this forum are ennui-inducive* and that the MOAB, despite its frailties, weaknesses, and tendency toward verbose postings in dead languages, is potentially more entertaining than the rest of the place put together. Yeah, I know it's a pretty low threshold, but sometimes one has to look for a bright spot wherever one can find it.

Please do not interpret my return as an indication that I'm going to read all the posts that have been made since I last darkened your door. They wouldn't make sense to a person of normal intelligence, much less an idiot like myself. Just because I'm an idiot doesn't mean I'm stupid.

How's Gluon?

* Ennui-inducive: a way to say "boring" using more than two syllables without cussing